Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [317]
The day before the president wrote the letter to his wife, he had received first news of the successful atomic test in New Mexico of an implosion device similar to “Fat Man,” which would be used against Nagasaki. The scientists, under enormous pressure to produce an outcome in time for Potsdam, had achieved “the greatest physics experiment in history.” “Little Boy,” the gun-type bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, needed no test. Truman could henceforward assume, therefore, that the U.S. would soon be able to employ such weapons against Japan. The enemy’s early surrender seemed overwhelmingly likely, but what combination of forces would precipitate this outcome was as uncertain as ever. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa writes: “It is clear that [Truman] saw Stalin not as an ally committed to the common cause of defeating Japan, but as a competitor in the race to see who could force Japan to surrender.” This assertion is important, because it has become one of the pillars upon which modern critics support their case against Hiroshima. The U.S. president deceived his own people and the world, they say, by claiming that he was employing the atomic bomb to force Japan’s surrender. In reality, this was the first military act of the Cold War, designed to overawe America’s future enemy, the Soviet Union.
Such a proposition attaches to Truman’s behaviour an unmerited malignity. The world in July 1945 seemed a deeply dangerous place not only to the president and to Byrnes, but also to cleverer and better-informed people such as Averell Harriman. Hitler had been destroyed, but the evil of Nazi tyranny was now supplanted in eastern Europe by an almost equally repugnant Communist one. Harriman asserted that the West was threatened with “a barbarian invasion.” The Russian conquest of eastern Europe provided Stalin with opportunities for imperial dominance, formally acknowledged at Yalta by an ailing Roosevelt, which the Russians had abused ever since. In Poland, the most conspicuous example, Soviet forces were systematically murdering every citizen who professed support for his country’s right to independence and democracy. There were no means short of war whereby Stalin’s new dominions could be wrested from him. Churchill’s Fulton speech still lay seven months ahead, but on 12 May 1945 he had already used its most momentous phrase: “An iron curtain is drawing down on the Russian front.” Moscow’s global ambitions were abundantly apparent.
Thoughtful and informed Americans were apprehensive about what new aggrandisement Stalin might attempt in the east. No U.S. invasion of Japan was feasible before November, yet the Soviets would invade Manchuria in August. When Moscow’s armies plunged into China, how likely was it that Stalin would respect his promises to forswear Mao Zedong’s Communists, and acknowledge the government of Chiang Kai-shek? There was concern that the Russians might exploit their planned drive into Korea to seize the whole peninsula instead of stopping halfway, at the 38th parallel, as agreed at Yalta. When Stalin’s forces staged their amphibious landings in the Kuriles, which had been promised to them, what if they went on to occupy some Japanese home islands? A strong Japanese Communist movement existed, the source of much unease in Tokyo, which might provide the nucleus for a Soviet puppet government. Lest it should seem that such speculation reflected mere paranoia in Washington, it is a matter of fact that when Stalin’s armies attacked in August, the Soviet leader held open the option of seizing Hokkaido, and almost certainly would have done so had Japanese resistance persisted.
Truman found himself president at a moment when it was alleged, not least by Winston Churchill, that American naïveté and weakness had licensed Soviet expansionism, and when fear of Communist takeover pervaded many nations. Atomic bombs should allow America to end the war with Japan before Stalin’s armies